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Facebook Messenger: inside Zuckerberg's app for everything

Beneath a yawning seven-metre-high Frank Gehry ceiling -- its outer shell covered by a 3.5-hectare Mark Zuckerberg-devised giant rooftop park; its pristine 40,000-square-metre interior decorated with posters imploring staff to "Move Fast And Break Things" and "Think Wrong" - David Marcus, a former president of PayPal, is calmly explaining to WIRED what he calls "one of the biggest opportunities in tech in the next ten years".

When Marcus made the surprise jump to Facebook to run its messaging division in August 2014, its Messenger app had 300 million monthly active users. A year later, when WIRED visits Facebook's cavernous new Menlo Park HQ in California, Messenger is up to 700 million actives, with more than a billion Android downloads - yet his team of 200 has taken what Marcus calls mere "baby steps" towards the ultimate ambition of building the company's next great global platform. "As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does."

David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook

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It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.

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"The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking." And, after initially being slow to respond to the rise of mobile - which he sought to make up by buying WhatsApp and Instagram - he wasn't now going to let Facebook fall into second place.

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Messenger began as a simple messaging app for iOS and Android in August 2011. In April 2014, it was separated from the main Facebook app; users would have to download it separately to collect mobile messages. Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account. And then, at F8, Zuckerberg revealed his cards. "Until now, we've focused on improving Messenger by building all these features ourselves," he declared. "Today we're going to talk about the next step. We're introducing Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app. But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information..."

In a statement provided by Facebook, Zuckerberg explains that building Messenger into a broader, more comprehensive communications tool is key to his wider strategy for Facebook. "Our goal is to help everyone around the world connect. It's a pretty broad goal, but we want everything we do to tie back to that," he says. "It's a big space. There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day." Which makes Messenger "one of the fastest growing and most important members of our family".

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That, Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger "enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."

It's easy to see why Facebook is taking messaging so seriously. People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries. And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network. "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? The appeal of theWeChat model and some of the things Facebook announced at F8 is around service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery. Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?"

For Marcus, the goal is nothing less than changing human behaviour. "How people see interaction inside mobile phones hasn't changed since flip phones," he says. "You have a keypad to dial, a phonebook icon to access contacts, another for messages and one for your voicemail. It's app-centric, not people centric. If today no phone existed, you wouldn't create an app-centric view of the world, you'd create a people-centric view. WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."

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Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing. So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"

Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles". "I ordered a T-shirt yesterday from Everlane and I just got a message this morning with my shipping notification and a map," Marcus says. "My whole history with Everlane was in that thread, and after months without any contact I just messaged them to order - and they replied, 'Would you like the crew type like your previous T-shirts?' You get a better experience than with a full native app.

"We're working with a bunch of airlines, and the first one that will launch with us is KLM. When you book a ticket, you get a nicely structured message inside Messenger from KLM with your itinerary; you get an interactive bubble when it's time to check in, and you get your boarding pass, your updates on gates, delays - and if you want to change your flight, you type that in the thread and they do it for you right there and then. Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction."

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Marcus's team is working with middleware providers such as Zendesk and FedEx to integrate businesses seamlessly into Messenger. "User experience is all," explains Stan Chudnovsky, head of product management for messaging products, who also joined from PayPal. "The best user interfaces and least friction translates to happy consumers who spend more time on us." Which also means giving those consumers access to artificial-intelligence (AI) agents to help them find what they're looking for - even if such AIs need salary-earning human beings to augment their real-time capabilities. "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."

The AI capability, called M, is powered by Wit.ai, a startup acquired by Facebook last January. As Marcus describes it, M goes far beyond the informational role of Apple's Siri. "You can say, 'I need to send flowers to my wife this afternoon, can you take care of it?' It knows who you are, your home address; it sends a nice bubble with a suggested bouquet, and you just accept it and it's done. We're playing around with this, rolling it out in tiny ways to see if it's scalable. Our approach is very much one of trying crazy bold things. Some will work, some won't - those that will work we'll scale aggressively.

"We want to innovate in real-time communications - all the experiences that we have in video calls, or when you're texting and see somebody at the same time, without leaving the app. Group conversations are important to us, including live discussions, or different sets of task management for groups of people - you're on a mountain, trying to figure out who is where."

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With his PayPal background, will Messenger also offer businesses a direct payment service? "We don't want to build a payments business," Marcus replies, "but we absolutely need to build a frictionless payment experience when people are in threads. If I have a flight open with KLM, I should be able to book my next flight and have a one-tap purchase experience. Same for e-commerce. The first baby steps are peer-to-peer payments in the US, which will expand into different countries." He sends a dollar to a colleague through the app to demonstrate.

Still... wouldn't payments provide a tempting revenue model? "When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says. "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach. We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."

I remember vividly at the F8 event in 2007 when the Facebook platform was announced, giving any developer the right to build apps on top of Facebook.com," says Julien Codorniou in the company's London office. "I was working at Microsoft, on the platform team of the biggest platform company, and I remember thinking, 'No way'. To be a platform, you need customer support and an army behind it - and Facebook had none of that. But he was absolutely right. Facebook built a $4 billion-a-quarter advertising business on top of the Facebook platform. And Messenger is the biggest extension of the Facebook platform since we launched in 2007."

Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan. It's been an easy sell, he says. "Messaging apps is a business where the daily retention is 50 to 60 per cent. Everybody wants to be in that business. We introduced a free lunch in a world where there isn't one. Getting organic traffic on mobile is way, way harder than on the web. And the average Facebook user on mobile goes back 14 times a day - spending 46 minutes a day."

For some of the platform's launch partners, the incentive is to build a more direct customer communication channel. "We sent out more than 400,000 order confirmations through Messenger in the four months since April, and feedback is very positive, particularly when people want a real-time chat or there's a problem," says Dave Atchison of Zulily, a Seattle e-commerce business targeting mothers with young children, which launches 9,000 new products a day. "Email over time has moved to being asynchronous and slow, and the phone is cumbersome. Customers want to communicate in their medium."

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Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes. We talk to customers like we talk to our friends, so Messenger is a pretty good platform from that perspective. You could also go to people you haven't talked to in a long time and say, 'Hey, what's going on?'" But the real attraction, Preysman says in his San Francisco office, is the potential to sell through the app. So far, just 20 per cent of Everlane sales are through mobile, whereas mobile traffic is at 45 per cent. "A customer service platform is nice, but ultimately we want to see if we can drive transactions, to get people to buy on the go. We do one-hour delivery in New York, and we're huge believers in instant gratification and convenience."

For other partners, the incentive lies in the power of social sharing. "Going out is fundamentally social - on average, we sell 2.3 tickets per booking," says Viktoras Jucikas, cofounder of ticket marketplace YPlan. "In the past, for friends deciding where to go, they would take screen shots of the app, send it to friends via WhatsApp, use SMS... That's a difficult way to share something. We want to integrate Messenger and make it a part of the flow."

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For a global commerce business like Rocket Internet, messaging represents an unprecedented opportunity to recruit customers at scale - and potentially to trade with them in-app. "In the past, people were spending their time on Facebook, on blogs, reading - now they're in messaging apps. A company that wants to acquire customers has to be present," says Rocket's global chief marketing officer, Arthur Gerigk. "If you're missing messaging apps, you're missing a huge amount of reach. You have to understand that you don't control things like you do on a website - you can't simply show a banner or choose a keyword or spam people. You have to build up an audience."

"We are one per cent finished, as we say at Facebook," Codorniou says. "One day, there will be companies built on Messenger, and we are at the beginning of that ecosystem. We launched at F8 mainly with expression apps like Giffy, Boostr and Legend. But that's the first generation. It's going to touch companies in e-commerce, utilities, travel, dating - I'm interested in every app. Our ambition is to fuel the growth of these companies. Nobody pays for the clicks they get on Messenger."

It's the nature of Facebook's "Done Is Better Than Perfect" culture that excitedly launched products can be quickly cut loose if they fail to shine (witness Facebook Gifts, Facebook Credits, Facebook Deals, Facebook Sponsored Stories, Facebook Questions, Facebook Poke, Facebook Beacon...). This time, senior executives are not holding back in their declarations of intent. "We're hoping for 90 per cent-plus penetration in the markets we're active," Stan Chudnovsky says. "We have very big ambitions. This is a hardcore utility - everyone has a need to talk. We'll look back and say 2015 was when the messaging revolution happened in the western world."

Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."

Their ambitions do sound heavily influenced by the reach of WeChat, whose automatic authentication and breadth of functionality have allowed it to be users' default way to play games, top up, access city services, book tickets, hail cabs and, crucially, spend money. Could this be a rare example of a western company brazenly copying Chinese tech? "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation. There were 2,000 years when everything happened through a conversation, then a blip when the web came out when behaviour was very structured - you'd go to websites, look for things to buy, and it was straight-up merchandising when you'd assume there were no human beings behind it. In Asia, the conversation was never removed. That's why people are discovering the world through those apps."

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Besides, Facebook's open approach to its platform differs from WeChat's paid-for selective in-app partnerships. "We need to leapfrog what they've done, to create better experiences than you would get with dedicated apps," Marcus says. "When WeChat launched, there was no Airbnb, Uber or other fast-growing apps. And the degree of what's acceptable is incredibly different in the west - if your messaging app, which is very personal, is buzzing all the time with advertising, you'll revert to SMS. The new experience you build needs to really be a big step change and make your life much easier."

After retail commerce and airline travel, Marcus is planning to take Messenger's platform into unspecified other verticals before "opening the floodgates". But won't that cannibalise Facebook's other messaging app? "WhatsApp is growing very nicely in developing countries," Marcus says. "Messenger is very much focused on developed counties. We don't really overlap that much. Honestly, we are not thinking about competing at all. The world is nicely split into countries where they dominate and we dominate." WhatsApp's management, though unwilling to be quoted, sees the two apps coexisting without much overlap.

The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules. Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform. This year, according to a Deloitte study that Facebook likes to quote, its platform will have an impact of $29 billion and support more than 600,000 jobs.

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And yet... the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android," he says. "I had a conversation with airline executives who were building a new app. I asked what their target was - if, two years from now, would they be happy with ten per cent of flyers on a plane having that app? They said that would be amazing. I said, OK, what if I told you I can give you 90 per cent of flyers with push notifications and the same functionality with less effort? And where transactions and interactions can happen within the app because the identity is linked to it?"

It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge. "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting," says Evans. "Because that's when you really start hacking away at apps. That's more powerful. Do you now need to install the [third-party] app? Both Apple and Google would like to do that. But they don't have the web identification platform, unlike Facebook."

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"The exciting thing about messaging," Marcus says, "and the reason I let myself be convinced by Mark not to be the CEO of a $50bn company to build this thing, is I believe this is one of the biggest opportunities in the next ten years and this is the best place to make it happen. We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."

David Rowan is editor of WIRED. He wrote about Oliver Samwer in 09.15

Photography: Spencer Lowell. Additional photography: Getty

This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine